eve-ate-the-right-fruit:

Before the abolition of slavery in the United States, the majority of American Christians believed God condoned slavery. That didn’t change until after the abolition of slavery. Abolitionist Christians existed, and there were denominational splits over the issue, but the abolition of slavery wasn’t made possible through those abolitionist Christians persuading their fellow Christians to change their minds. Their fellow Christians were only able to gain space to change their minds once slavery was abolished. Before it was abolished, many Christians didn’t have the ability to imagine God beyond a God that ordained the status quo. The same lack of imagination exists today.

This is how most beliefs function. We rationalize and internalize the reality that has been institutionalized in our everyday lives. We naturally want to assume that there must be a good reason that things are the way they are, and that people much smarter than us must have set things up this way. Obviously, individuals can change their minds on their own, but the only way to change minds on a mass scale is to transform the institutions in our everyday lives to give people a new reality to rationalize and internalize. This is how minds change en masse, for better or for worse.

Before a massive transformation, people fight and cling to their old conceptions of God, claiming that those who are trying to transform things are working against God, who carefully set things up the way they are. Then, after the transformation takes place, people praise God for leading the way for this necessary historic change… .

Abolishing the institutions that maintain our inequalities is the only way to open up space for Christian teachings that preach equality to become the norm. Christian history is filled with those who understood this and were empowered by their faith to resist the institutions that used Christianity to oppress them. Those who choose to continue this important work today are joining a long line of Christians who helped shape the path toward our collective liberation.

Damon Garcia, The God Who Riots: Taking Back the Radical Jesus

This brings up so many memories of people from my generation having to explain to younger generations that, yes, there was a time when a very high percentage of people in the USA were against gay marriage. And interracial marriage. And truth in advertising laws. And mandated seatbelt use. And smoking not being allowed in restaurants. And treating fanfiction as “fair use.” And so on, and so on, and so on. And none of these things got as normalized as they are now, until after they’d been validated through legal cases.

Sometimes change does start at the legislative level.

Not always. There are things we couldn’t enforce if they were laws. Hell, some of the things I listed can’t even be enforced as much as we might like. But laws can do a lot to normalize things.